52 Weeks – Week 12 – Bens! (And a new child, and 8-Bit Mars!)

(For this week, instead of picking an image from flickr, I uploaded this one of Ben’s yet-unnamed firstborn child, who was born yesterday. I figured, since the piece is called “Bens!” it would be appropriate.)

This isn’t really a song. It’s barely anything coherent. I guess it would be best to describe it as more of an experiment than anything else. Sometime in 1997, when SaXon Geat was still in its formative stages, Ben wrote a bassline and some ear-splitting guitar chords that lasted all of fifteen seconds, then later I added a melody. Then I added a bass solo. Then I added another sort of B section. Then I repeated the first part, slower and shifted down a whole step. It was basically just a meandering thing that never really ended, so it has no form whatsoever, but it still has some interesting parts.

You may note that the MP3 featured here sounds like Nintendo music. That’s because recently I’ve been having some fun with making chiptunes out of old MIDI files, such as “Lightning,” or, even better, Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War.” I did it with “Bens!” because the sound quality of the original MIDI was so horrifyingly bad that to listen to it one’s ears might bleed. (If you want to subject yourself to it, you can certainly do so. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Because I did.)